Friday, October 01, 2010

Baby Quilts

The first quilt I ever made was a baby quilt that my Mum and I made together a couple of years ago for Lilly's pregnant pre-primary teacher.

We cut out a bunch of squares of cotton, taped them all to bits of card and snuck them in to the classroom on a day we knew Mrs Stent wasn't going to be there. Each child in the class was given a square to draw a picture for her and the baby using fabric markers (the kind you iron to set).

I must say it turned out rather well considering Mum and I had never made a quilt before. I quilted it by stitching in the ditch, and backed with some lovely bright rainbow fabric.

We naturally couldn't give it to her without some quality control testing, so here is Gen giving it her seal of approval.

I have also made a rag quilt for Geni's bed, made completely from stuff that I had already. Although technically some of it was fabric that my Mum had already, but she let me steal it :P

It's two layers of flannel with a square of bamboo batting sandwiched in the middle. The back of the quilt is all red. For some reason I had 5m of red flannel... I honestly can't remember why I bought that much of it, undoubtedly it was going to be something good though! :P

This is how it looked when I put it on her bed, almost like I planned the colours. I love when that happens!

And this is the quilt I just finished the other day for my brand new baby niece Sophia.

It's a stacked coins baby quilt, I used a jelly roll that I got from Spotlight and supplemented it with a couple of other fabrics I had in my stash. I now know that it is a stupid idea to prewash precut fabric. It all shrank to different widths and I didn't want to trim them all so I just went with it and ended up with stacks that didn't line up perfectly. But it turned out okay in the end!

The back is pink/brown/white stripes with a pieced strip.

I quilted it with wonky line stitching that is between 1/4" and 1/2" apart. I was going to teach myself to free motion quilt for it, but I didn't get around to practising so I went with lines :P

Next time I'll get rid of peg marks before I take photos!

My sewing machine was being naughty while I was quilting. I changed the needle and fiddled with the tension to no avail, so there are quite a few skipped stitches in the quilting.. I'm hoping nobody looks close enough to notice :P